Healthy aging adviser: Designing a service to support the life transitions and autonomy of older adults

Abstract

A growing population of older adults is living alone, yet little is known about their need to maintain a sense of autonomy. In this study, an interdisciplinary team of design, nursing, and marketing researchers examined the patterns of older adults’ autonomy and proposed a service to assist their life transitions. The objectives include: (1) exploring the principle of autonomy as the core value of a service design case study for older adults; (2) identifying their daily living needs in relation to autonomy; and (3) improving aging adults’ autonomy by implementing a human-centred design approach to build a service. After conducting research with older adults living alone in an assisted living facility, we defined several service strategies: upfront preparation for life transitions, graduated preventive care, and desirable interactions with community. We designed a service named ‘Healthy Aging Adviser’ that supports the relational autonomy of older adults.

Keywords:

• Service design
• transformative service research
• healthcare design
• autonomy
• design for older adults

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miso Kim

Dr. Miso Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University where she explores the humanist framework of service design, with a focus on dignity, autonomy, and participation. She holds a PhD in Design, an MDes in Interaction Design, and an MDes in Information Design from Carnegie Mellon University. She taught service design and interaction design at CMU, and worked as a Senior User Experience Designer at Cisco Systems.

Valeria Ramdin

Dr. Valeria Ramdin is an Assistant Clinical Professor at Northeastern University Bouve College of Health Sciences. Her research focuses on self management of chronic disease. She is an experienced nurse with 30+ years in leadership, practice, academia and entrepreneurship national and international. She serves on the Massachusetts Action Coalition, the Association of Black Nursing Faculty Policy committee and the Board of Directors for Boston HealthCare for the Homeless. She has many awards for excellence in practice and teaching. Dr. Ramdin holds a Ph.D, MS and a BSN in Nursing from Northeastern University, Boston.

Rachel Pozzar

Rachel Pozzar, PhD, RN, FNP-BC is a family nurse practitioner with over a decade of clinical nursing experience in the inpatient progressive care and community health care settings. Her program of research is focused on the promotion of patient-centered cancer care, and her research interests include patient-centered communication, treatment decision making, and disparities in gynecologic cancer treatment and outcomes. She is a graduate of the PhD in Nursing program at Northeastern University.

Paul Fombelle

Paul W. Fombelle is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. His current research interests examine service innovation, customer feedback management, customer loyalty and relationship marketing, and service experience management. Paul’s global research partners span a variety of sectors including technology, financial, health, food/fine dining, retail, and entertainment services.

Xing Zhou

Xing Zhou is a lecturer at the School of Art and Communication of Beijing Technology and Business University; He is also a doctoral student at the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University. He was a visiting scholar at Northeastern University from 2017 to 2018. His research interests are in design management, interaction design, and service design.

Yixuan Zhang

Yixuan Zhang is a PhD student in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Zhang’s research is focused on the interdisciplinary area of human-computer interaction, information visualization, and health sciences. Yixuan is interested in exploring how personal visualization supports exploration and understating health problems.

Muling Jiang

Muling Jiang is product designer at CertiK. She worked at the intersection of UX design, visual design, data visualization, and architecture design for companies like UBER, Philips, and AECOM. She recently graduated with her Master’s in Information Design and Visualization from Northeastern University.